


Two Halves

by harin91



Category: Actor RPF, Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018) Actor RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Jurassic Park era, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, The Pacific era, also mentioned Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, pre-Bohemian Rhapsody, the whole Malek family is here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 13:51:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18053717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harin91/pseuds/harin91
Summary: "Rami had understood the meaning of the word 'soulmate' since he had been very, very young."- or, how Rami found his soulmate.





	Two Halves

**Author's Note:**

> Hi again!  
> This took me a while to finish, as I had the general idea of what I wanted to write, but as usual lacked the whole picture of how to write it and the time to sit down and actually write.
> 
> As always, this is just for fun and fandom, I’m in no way claiming this to be anywhere close to reality.  
>  **Not beta-readed** and English is not my first language.  
> 

Rami had understood the meaning of the word ‘soulmate’ since he had been very, very young.

Of course he had, being born a twin.

 

Growing up from the day he was born with another person by his side, identical in looks and extremely connected in thoughts, had always sparked conversations and theories from the adults around them, statements he had carefully listened to: two halves of a whole, they said. A deep bond, a lifetime shared between two souls and all of that jazz.

Yes, Sami and him were, especially in the very early years of their lives, exactly like that: always together and completely in tune with one another.

So those conversations made sense, in a way.

In another, though, it seemed like the world ‘soulmate’ didn’t fit his close relationship with his twin brother, no matter how similar they were and how much they loved and depended on each other.

It had been his mom, at some point during his pre-school years, to explain to him what a soulmate really was: “It’s all about the love, _habibi_ .” she said calmly, running her delicate hand through Rami’s short curls as she was tucking him into bed.  
“Of course the love you nurture for your family is pure, but it isn’t chosen by you. The person you will chose to give your truest, purest and deepest love to, that person is going to be your soulmate. Some people never get to find it, some others never truly search for it, thinking they don’t need it, they won’t be able to love just once, just one. But some others, they know: they feel the connection, they search for their beloved… they’re destined to one.” she smiled kindly, like always.

And since that day, Rami had known deep down inside that, no matter what, he was going to find his one.

 

There where, Rami soon discovered, many theories about how two lost souls destined to be together were able to find each other during the course of a single lifetime.

Some people were born with clear evidences, like birthmarks or peculiar clusters of moles that matched perfectly the ones on their soulmate’s bodies.

Rami had looked at length at his body’s reflection after discovering this information, but the only sign of anomalies on his body were, perhaps, the sprinkle of tiny freckles he had on his shoulders and back.

This may have meant his soulmate would have freckles on their back too, which seemed exciting, but that didn’t give him any useful information about who they may had been.

Some others claimed they had memories from previous lifetimes, moments shared with their matching souls, which formed gradually during the course of their current lives, perfectly mixed up with their own memories.

It took some time for this kind of theory to be proven wrong for Rami, but by his 7th birthday he became well able to say this wasn’t his (and his soulmate’s) case: his memories were exclusively his own and if some of them seemed less clear or precise than others, that was completely normal. It was simply how the human mind worked, he had been told.

Not much different from this second type of soulmate connection was the third: shared dreams (sometime nightmares). These could fall into two different categories: people who shared dreams of past lives and people who shared dreams of current lives.

The latter was, to Rami, the most intriguing alternative, since it made searching for his soulmate a little bit easier than the others.

 

That was why, when at around 8 years old he started dreaming of people he felt like identifying as his parents although they were very unlike his own, or of a playground in a city he didn’t recognise, instead of waking up scared or weirded out, he felt absolutely ecstatic.

He still had his own dreams to dream at night.

Which made sense, since his soulmate needed Rami’s dreams as well, to ensure his other half was somewhere in the world waiting to find them.

But every now and then, he would dream this other person’s dreams and wake up wondering what the actual heck was wrong with his soulmate and the absurdity of the life and dreams they dreamed about.

Given that some of his soulmate’s dreams were pretty normal, like those about school or birthday parties with friends or holidays with their family, some other were so unique for contents and settings that Rami often had to mark them as too absurd to be considered useful in his quest to find who his other half was.

His mom had suggested to keep a dream journal, to register every single detail he could recall from those dreams that weren’t his own, but when those weird dreams started happening, he just decided to ignore them.

Maybe his soulmate just had a very creative and imaginative mind.

 

The most vivid and recurrent weird dream he associated to his soulmate started by the end of summer 1992, when he was 11 years old. He was dreaming about something perfectly calm and normal, like playing with his older sister or swimming in a pool, when all of sudden he was in the middle of a dark forest and, all around him, there were dinosaurs.

Rami, like every other child his age, had been a fan of dinosaurs right until that very first dream.

In that dream they were big and scary and Rami was running and escaping and screaming. After that first dream he woke up drenched in sweat and terrified to the point he had to wake up Sami and ask him to share his bed so he could cuddle close to his twin just to be able to fall back to sleep.

His soulmate was chronically afraid of dinosaurs, then.

Rami wished he could do anything to help them out with that fear, but the only outcome of their peculiar oneiric connection had soon become that Rami also had started being afraid of gigantic extinct reptiles.

The dinosaurs dreams kept on coming throughout the month and by the end of September Rami had been so scared of dreaming yet again of having to hide from dangerous velociraptors, that his mother had asked the family doctor a prescription of valerian drops to help him fall asleep when he was too nervous to do so.

Then, all of sudden, the dreams stopped. But their memory lingered, so that when it was announced the release of a movie called ‘Jurassic Park’ and everyone in Rami and Sami’s school had wanted to go to the theater to watch it, he had refused to go and hid for an entire afternoon in Yasmine’s bedroom.

Even after years, when he had become officially too old to be afraid of dinosaurs, he still hadn’t seen the movie and refused to even talk about it, giving lame excuses as to why he had never watched it and why he really didn’t want to, no matter how many of his friends had offered to borrow their VHS.

 

Accidents like the ‘dinosaurs trauma’, albeit not as dramatic as the ‘dinosaurs trauma’, kept on happening in the continuous exchange of dream Rami and his soulmate had all through childhood and presumably both their teenage years.

Rami would suddenly dream about a book on a shelf or a red and white cat on a windowsill and spend the following days looking for the same book in the local library or ask his parents if they could adopt a kitten.  
Most of the time he found out it was too difficult searching for a book just by looking up what little he remembered of the title or of how the cover had looked like. Not to mention the kitten dream was what helped him and his family realising he was allergic to cats.

It then took him a bit more time to realise exactly why and how, every now and then, his soulmate would dream about things that really didn’t match with the rest of his very ordinary and normal life-like dreams.  
It started all making sense around the same time Rami took up acting as a devoted hobby and he himself started having his own dreams infested with elements, sounds and colours from the plays he had been rehearsing in the daytime.

Of course he couldn’t be certain about it, but it would have made a whole lot of sense if his soulmate had been a wannabe actor or actress as much as him: if they were going to meet in this lifetime, and by this point Rami was absolutely sure about it, they needed a common ground to start from, a shared characteristic that was going to trigger their first encounter.

This gave Rami’s motivation to pursue an acting career a substantial push forward: despite his parents not being completely in tune with the idea of one of their children not becoming a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher like Sami had decided as he applied for college, they allowed him to choose a university with a rich and interesting program in drama classes.

 

He went, he studied, he got his diploma and all of sudden he was in New York, looking for a gig. He lived in a very small flat with five other people, he worked night shifts in a shitty and borderline dangerous club and he missed his family but he was fascinated by how much the unfamiliar city felt somehow familiar to him.

Like he had been living there far longer than a few months. Like he had visited before, in a dream.

By the end of 2002 Rami figured out New York had been a bad decision all along and got home on a flight that landed in LAX at exactly 1 am of the 1st of January 2003. Sami was at the airport to pick him up and he wasn’t thrilled by the hour or the day chosen for his return home but he still hugged him softly and told him he was loved and he had been missed.

That same early morning, finally getting to bed in his old bedroom in his parent’s house, Rami fell asleep after having been crying for more than one reason.

 

There is a distinct memory he has of that time, which feels like it had been real but it could also had been a dream for how the outlines are a bit blurred in his mind.

He was sitting on his parent’s couch, watching TV with his head on Yasmine’s shoulder. She was carefully stroking his hair as he was almost drifting to sleep, after a long day of working his part-time job and running around LA to deliver resumes.

Yasy, at that time, had just started dating who had become her husband some years later and Rami remembers asking: “Do you think he’s your soulmate?”

“Yes,” she had replied, calmly: “I’m sure he is.”

“How can you tell?” he had inquired again: Yasmine had never said if she could dream her soulmate’s dreams or do any of the other things people said two souls destined to be together could do. Rami hadn’t been sure how it worked otherwise.

“I’m choosing him and he’s choosing me.” she said, her voice a soft memory against the side of his head: “Every time he’s with me, it feels right.”

She kept stroking his hair, their eyes on the TV screen but their thoughts elsewhere.

Rami had not shared a single dream with his soulmate in almost three years. It felt like he hadn’t been able to properly dream in three years, which really hadn’t been helping with his depression, at that uncertain time of his life.

“What do you think they look like?” Yasmine had asked suddenly, just a whisper.

Rami had thought about them too many times to be able to give an univocal reply. Whoever they were, whatever they did with their life, wherever they were at the moment, Rami just knew they were going to be enough.

“They’re perfect.” he said, after a long time: “They’re for me.” just before drifting to sleep dreamlessly.

 

Time passed and Rami became an actor with an agent and a SAG card. It may did not all happen in the right consequential order like everyone else and it may had taken him more time and more patience and a bit more bumps in the road, but it still happened.

By the time he was casted (and then re-casted) for a role in the movie ‘Night at the Museum’, he was back in NYC for rehearsals and filming and his soulmate’s dream had shyly come back. Every now and then he would dream about glimpse of New York he had never seen before, places he had never visited, matches of baseball he absolutely knew nothing about, more books, more scenes that could belong to unrecognisable movies and shows… and his heart ached. They were close, he could feel.

He didn’t know how to tell them he was still waiting, still willing to look out for them.

 

It was the beginning of 2007 when Rami first heard about another HBO production of a miniseries following the success of ‘Band of Brothers’ and he immediately felt compelled to tell his agent to try everything she could to book an audition.

He didn’t know where that sudden urge to get a part in a TV series based on the real stories of WWII veterans came from, but he dove head-first into all the auditions that followed and gave his damn best in each of them.

He was called back over and over.

By the time he had been scheduled the last audition at Tom Hanks’s office, he has started dreaming vividly about the scenes he had been preparing for months, the things he had been reading about in books and texts, mixed with scenes from other movies and shows he had been watching to prepare for the role.

It made all so much sense he was experiencing such dreams, he wasn’t even questioning if they were his own or his soulmate’s.

In Tom Hanks’s office Rami not only met Tom Hanks for the first time, he also met Steven Spielberg and found out that, if they decided to cast him in the end, he was going to work with no other than the actor who had been the kid on Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’.  
Rami had felt like laughing at the irony.

The kid’s name was Joe.

Joe was an amazing actor and so fitted for the role of Eugene Sledge that Rami found rehearsing only a tiny bit of scene with him so natural and spontaneous it felt almost like magic had sparked inside the room.

“We’ve got this.” he said to Joe, still in a daze, right after they were rushed outside the office to wait in the corridor.

Joe had smiled and nodded politely and a few moments later they were confirmed for the roles.

If Rami’s skin had buzzed all trough that evening and then for two more whole days, if his heartbeat had felt slightly different in tune, if his dreams had become even more vivid and clear, in the blur of excitement he didn’t notice a single change.

 

He saw Joe again in Australia.

Joe had been on set for a few days already, considering his role was the leading one for the section of the show based on ‘With the Old Breed’ and he was required in far more scenes than Rami’s character.

That meant Joe had already bonded with some of the other guys in the cast and crew and for the first days of rehearsal they had together on set, they spoke very little and only about work.

Still, Joe was nice and polite and exuded a strange aura of safety and confidence Rami believed came from being a child actor and having basically lived on movie sets almost all his life.

When boot camp started and they had to train like real Marines for almost a whole month, Rami found it easy to rely on Joe as a comrade-in-arms just as their characters would rely on each other.

Dreams weren’t frequent because they all went to bed exhausted and slept very little, so Rami was feeling a little detached from reality, a little out of space, out of world.

And when Joe smiled back at him after a shared joke, a little out of breath too.

 

Boot camp shaped them and made them realise just how brutal the war they were portraying had been for real people in the past. The awareness they had a responsibility of bringing justice to their memory grounded all the actors and helped them focus all through the shootings.

Just like their characters, Rami and Joe grew closer and closer to the point that they became inseparable. They spent time together on and off set, acting and rehearsing and adding layers to the scripts they were given, which sometimes were too little and a bit underdone all thanks to the writer’s strike that was happening in Hollywood.

They sometimes fell asleep in each other’s trailers, on couches while watching TV or on beds while trying to figure out their lines. They sometimes shared space while dreaming of mud and rain, of mortars and war and fellowship and loyalty.

 

One particular recurrent dream was what made Rami slowly come to his senses.

He was running and running and climbing rocky hills and shouldering his rifle and all he could feel was the pounding of his heart, the rumble of his breath ringing in his ears.

Sometimes the dream stopped right there, sometimes he got through a hill and on the other side of the slope there was a figure on the ground and he knew it was another soldier and he knew the man was there because he had been struck down, but the image in is head was peaceful. He always approached cautiously, calling a name he couldn’t hear, beckoning the figure to turn around and show his face.

One night the dream went on long enough for the figure to turn around and suddenly Rami was looking at himself, at Snafu lying on the ground, not bloodied or wounded but calm, like he had been waiting.

His name resounded in his dream with the sound of Joe’s voice.

 

When he woke up it was still early in the morning and the sun hadn’t risen yet.  
Outside his trailer the world was still and quiet and Rami felt like he was disrupting its perfection just by rolling on his side on the bed to face Joe, who was already awake and looking back at him.

Breath caught in his throat as they shared a long look, telling each others silently how stupid they had been, how blind in not realizing sooner, as soon as they first met months ago.

 

“You had been so scared of those dinosaurs, hadn’t you? Kept on having nightmares about them.” Rami said at some point, breaking the perfect silence.

“I was 8 years old, Rams.” replied Joe, smiling effortlessly: “Of course I was scared, I was projecting. God, I used to wet the bed because of Jurassic Park!”

They laughed and eventually they scooped closer and finally they chose each other over again.

 

And Rami knew what having a soulmate meant.

 

\---

 

I hope you liked it!  
You can find me on Tumblr at [brightly-painted-canvas](brightly-painted-canvas.tumblr.com). Come say hi and discuss Mazlek together, I love a chat :D


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